"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Three members of the fraternity accused in a now-retracted Rolling Stone article of facilitating a brutal gang rape are suing the magazine, its publisher and the author.
George Elias IV, Ross Fowler and Stephen Hadford allege in their lawsuit that they were easily identified as members of Phi Kappa Psi who could have participated in the gang-rape, which was proved false shortly after the article was published. The three men have since graduated but allege in their lawsuit that they were subjected to harassment following the article’s publication.
Elias’ bedroom was at the top of the first flight of stairs in the fraternity house, and was “the mostly likely scene of the alleged crime,” the former students say. Elias says in the lawsuit that after “family friends, acquaintances, co-workers and reporters” identified him as one of the potential attackers, they “interrogated him, humiliated him, and scolded him.” Fowler and Hadford say they “suffered similar attacks.”
The lawsuit alleges that the students’ names and hometowns were listed online by anonymous Internet commenters, ensuring their “names will forever be associated with the alleged gang rape.” . . .
Once Elias was identified, he was “solicited daily for three consecutive days at his own home” by T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post, whose own investigation into the Rolling Stone claims brought about the article’s demise. Elias claims in the lawsuit that he “became nervous and distraught that reporters were easily able to find him and solicit him at his home.” . . .
The men are suing for two counts of defamation and “negligent infliction of emotional distress,” requesting $75,000 for each of the three counts.
The Rolling Stone story at the center of the lawsuit, “A Rape on Campus,” claimed that a University of Virginia college freshman named “Jackie” was gang-raped by seven fraternity members at a Phi Psi party. One of her alleged attackers was her date for the evening, “Drew,” who allegedly worked as a lifeguard at the school aquatics facility. . . .
As the story fell apart, different names were given for “Drew,” including “Haven Monahan.”
The fraternity members note in their lawsuit that no such party or gathering took place the night Jackie claimed — there was no pledging in the fall semester, no one named “Drew” or “Haven Monahan” was a member at the time, no member worked as a lifeguard at the time and no member matched the physical description given in the article.
In fact, neither “Drew” nor “Haven Monahan” ever existed.
Further, Charlottesville police investigated the claims made in the article and acknowledged in a press conference that the department was “not able to conclude to any substantive degree” that such claims were accurate.
The false article led to Phi Psi’s fraternity house being vandalized, and the fraternity was suspended by U.Va. President Teresa Sullivan, who, even after admitting the story was false, imposed numerous restrictions on Phi Psi and other fraternities.
The fraternity members’ lawsuit is the second filed against Rolling Stone due to the retracted story. U.Va. Dean Nicole Eramo, who was the only named villain in the article, filed a lawsuit in May against the magazine for its portrayal of her.
Amid the lawsuits, Rolling Stone announced that Managing Editor Will Dana is set to leave the magazine on Aug. 7. Dana issued an apology for the discredited article on Dec. 5, 2014, and received a backlash for suggesting that the problem with the story was the magazine’s “misplaced” trust in Jackie. . . .
Dana told the Columbia Journalism Review, which did a deep dive into the journalistic failures of the article, that he didn’t know Erdely hadn’t found the rapist named by Jackie, and when the source stopped responding to messages, Dana allowed Erdely to stop looking for the accused rapist and use a pseudonym in the article.
Rolling Stone’s publisher, Jann S. Wenner, whose media company is also being sued by the fraternity members, didn’t answer questions about whether Dana was leaving due to the gang-rape article. Instead, through a spokesman, he told the New York Times that “many factors go into a decision like this.”
Dana does not have another job lined up, and no successor has been named.

One of the strange things about feminism is how this movement, built upon hateful slander, has acquired the power to silence its critics. In 1977, when a few dozen women turned out to hear Andrea Dworkin speak in Amherst, it was still possible to oppose feminism on an American university campus. Today, dissenting voices are almost never heard in academia, where feminists exercise the kind of controlling power wielded by the mullahs in Tehran or by Kim Jung Un in Pyongyang.

What has happened is that the pursuit of “equality” — enforced by federal authority under Title IX — has made university officials fearful of claims of “discrimination” under the so-called “hostile environment” doctrine. No one in academia dares to challenge feminism directly. Remember that Larry Summers was forced to resign as president of Harvard after he suggested there are “innate differences” between men and women. Feminists stage tumultuous protests whenever a dissident like Christina Hoff Sommers or Wendy McElroy appears on campus.

Feminist hegemony in academia has fostered an implacable hostility toward males on campus, and perceptive young men recognize feminism as the source of this hatred. The problem is that there are few if any male professors on the faculty of the modern university who are willing to criticize feminist ideology. With no good examples to follow, young men tend to express their opposition to feminism in ways that are crude and inarticulate, transparently motivated by personal resentment. This tendency, in turn, inspires feminists to become even more militant, as when Helen Lewis declared in 2012 that “the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.” Such circular reasoning — that opposition to feminism proves the need for more feminism — points us toward a future of endless hostility, as feminism becomes more and more anti-male, and men become more and more anti-feminist.

We can only avert such an escalation of hostility by understanding its origins and history, which requires us recognize the actual source of this conflict, namely feminist aggression. Consider, as an example, the role played by the radical provocateur Andrea Dworkin. In her 1993 collection Letters from a War Zone, Dworkin includes her 1977 speech at Amherst denouncing pornography:

Fascist propaganda celebrating sexual violence against women is sweeping this land. Fascist propaganda celebrating the sexual degradation of women is innundating cities, college campuses, small towns. Pornography is the propaganda of sexual fascism. Pornography is the propaganda of sexual terrorism.

Rather than to describe pornography as immoral and obscene, you see, Dworkin characterized it as expressing male “sexual fascism.” This is an important distinction. A Christian must deplore pornography as sinful, yet Dworkin was a radical atheist who hated Christianity at least as much as she hated pornography. Rather than condeming pornography on moral grounds, Dworkin made pornography Exhibit A in her political indictment of males. Introducing the text of that 1977 speech (“Pornography: The New Terrorism,” page 197 of Letters from a War Zone), Dworkin tells us that she subsequently “gave this speech on lots of college campuses.” She also describes the immediate effect this speech had the first time she gave it to University of Massachusetts students:

They mobilized on the spot to demonstrate against the pornography being shown on campus: a film advertised in the school newspaper . . . that had been brought on campus by a man who had just been arrested for beating the woman he lived with.

Porno films being shown on the campus of a state university? That never happened when I was in college in Alabama back in the 1970s, but then again, Alabama is not Massachusetts. However, there was an interesting denouement to Dworkin’s speech at U-Mass. A few months later, undoubtedly incited by her radicalism, feminists on the staff of the student newspaper began quarreling with males on the staff over editorial policy and, in May 1978, feminist protesters seized control of the newspaper’s offices:

Fifty women took over the offices of the student newspaper of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst at 2 a.m. [May 1], demanding that women’s news receive more coverage in the paper.
The protesters, who were still in the building last night, said they will not leave until their demands are met in a “legally binding document.”
The students are demanding guaranteed space for women’s news, editorial control over women’s stories and the right of women’s staff members to pick women’s news editors.
William Sundstrom, the editor-in-chief, said the paper will probably not change its policies “because news should be integrated, not segregated.” . . .
Sit-in leaders said yesterday they decided to occupy the building when provious negotiations “accomplished nothing.”
“In the past, women’s news staff attempts to provide high quality coverage of women’s issues have been consistently sabotaged by staff members of other departments,” Julie Melrose, women’s editor and a sit-in leader, said yesterday.
She alleged that the staff arbitrarily cuts news stories about women, censors feminist editorials, omits articles submitted by women, runs sexist ads, and harasses female staff members.
Michael Smolens, sports editor and one of the paper’s negotiators, said yesterday the newspaper covers women’s issues fairly, adding the protesters are upset because the news “lacks a feminist bent.”
The only time he remembers that the staff censored a feminist editorial was when the editorial attacked staff members by name, Smolens said.

Whether the claims of censorship and harassment were true is perhaps irrelevant at this late date. The point is that feminists resented the authority of the male editors, either in terms of editorial content or staffing decisions, and insisted that women on the staff should be permitted to exercise control independent of the male editors.

This incident demonstrated the teleological purpose of feminism, to abolish male power, per se. As long as any man occupies any position in which he exercises any authority over any women, feminism’s work is not accomplished. Viewing the world through the distorted lenses of radicalism, the feminist sees herself as oppressed — a member of “an enslaved population . . . an occupied people,” as Dworkin said — and resents any man who possesses superior status, prestige or influence. Feminist ideology portrays males as parasitical usurpers, and thus denies that any man can ever deserve respect for his achievements, because his success is always the result of unfair “male privilege.” Nor can any authority exercised by a man ever be recognized as legitimate by feminists, because male power is inherently harmful to women.

What emerges from this resentful worldview is a feminist rhetoric that is deliberately insulting toward males. No man is trustworthy, no man deserves praise and no man possesses any ability that can entitle him to feminist admiration. This is why the “male feminist” is such a pathetic figure, imagining that he can earn respect from women by endorsing an ideology that denies any intrinsic basis for such respect. (Feminism’s first rule for men is “SHUT UP!”) Feminists reserve a particularly venomous hatred for liberal men like Noah Berlatsky, whose “Playboy Feminism” has made him a target of Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy’s ire.

Confronted by the characteric hatefulness of the feminist, a young man is likely to deduce that this angry woman — who seems to despise him merely because he is male — is a lesbian. Certainly this deduction is not unwarranted, when we consider, inter alia, that the leading introductory Women’s Studies textbook is edited by three lesbian professors, and that the communications director of the Feminist Majority Foundation described herself as a “raging lesbian feminist.” To quote the title of a 2010 textbook written by Professor Mimi Marinucci, Feminism Is Queer, and who am I to disagree? Despite all evidence, including Professor Bonnie Zimmerman’s declaration that “historically, lesbianism and feminism have been coterminous if not identical social phenomena,” any man who points this out is met with angry condemnation. You are a misogynist, a bigoted homophobe expressing ignorant stereotypes, if you mention the remarkable prevalence of lesbianism among feminists.

That’s an index entry from p. 310 of Professor Graham’s book, which includes citations to Dworkin’s Woman Hating (1974), Right Wing Women (1983) and Intercourse(1987). This is certainly not a coincidence, any more than the 1978 feminist takeover of the U-Mass student newspaper was a coincidence. Andrea Dworkin knew exactly what she was doing when she incited feminist hatred against males,, and on page 27 of Letters from a War Zone,, Dworkin describes what happened after the U-Mass takeover, “The male editors especially aroused anger against the women by calling them lesbians.” Describing this as a “hate campaign these male editors waged,” Dworkin provided the text of a speech she gave at a rally in support of the U-Mass feminists in which she compared the student newspapers male editors to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels:

Enemies of women, those who are determined to deny us freedom and dignity, use the word lesbian to provoke a hatred of women who do not conform. . . . This hatred is sustained and expressed by virtually every insitituion. . . The threat is that this hatred will explode into violence. The threat is omnipresent because violence against women is culturally applauded. . . .
It is horrifying, but not surprising, that the males on the [student newspaper] . . . have used the word lesbian in the malicious way I have just discribed. With contempt and ridicule, they have been waging a furtive, ruthless propaganda campaign against the feminist occupiers. They are using the word lesbian to rouse the most virulent woman hating on this campus.. . . They are using the word lesbian to hide the true history of their own woman-hating malice in running that corrupt, pretentious, utterly hypocritical newspaper.

These were serious accusations and, in comparing the male student editors to Goebbels, certainly Andrea Dworkin intended to inflame women’s hatred against them. One thing Dworkin did not do, however, was to deny that the feminist protesters at U-Mass were in fact lesbians.

Were they? In the wake of the protests, U-Mass hired Janice Raymond (a lesbian protégé of Mary Daly) as a professor of Women’s Women’s studies, where she remained until her retirement in 2002. In the acknowledgements for her 1986 book A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection, Professor Raymond thanks Andrea Dworkin (“a source of inspiration and strength”) and also thanks another woman whose name may you might recognize: “Julie Melrose dauntlessly read the proofs of this book aloud with me.” Professor Raymond’s personal proofreader, you see, was the same Julie Melrose who as a U-Mass undergraduate led the occupation of the student newspaper. However, don’t speculate why Ms. Melrose would be proofreading a lesbian professor’s lesbian book years later, or you’ll be called a Nazi who wants to “provoke a hatred of women who do not conform.”

So, whatever happened to the male editors of the U-Mass Collegian? In her 1978 speech, Dworkin said these young men “used words to foster ignorance and to encourage bigotry”:

It is shameful to continue to tolerate their flagrant contempt for women, for lesbians; for words, for news, for simple fairness and equity. It is honorable and right to take from them the power they have so abused. I hope that you will strip them of it altogether.

Down with men! Strip them of their power! This is the sum and essence of radical feminism — males can never be trusted with power, because males will always use power to oppress women.

Feminists foster hatred against men, and it should not surprise us that men resent this hatred. Nor should we be surprised by the association between feminism and lesbianism, which feminists themselves have done so much to encourage. This is a real phenomenon, as I explain in the final chapter of Sex Trouble:

In 1980, Australian feminist Denise Thompson described how “countless numbers of lesbians” joined the feminist movement because it offered them “the possibility of a cultural community of women whose primary commitment was to other women rather than to men.” Furthermore, Thompson added, the rise of the feminist movement produced a “mass exodus of feminist women from the confining structures of heterosexuality” in such numbers as to raise questions about “the institution of heterosexuality in the consciousness of those feminists who, for whatever reason, chose not to change their sexual orientation.” And why shouldn’t this have been the expected result?
Women “changed their sexual/social orientation from men to women,” Thompson explained, “in response to the feminist political critique of their personal situations of social subordination.” If the personal is political (as feminists say) and if women’s relationships with men are “confining structures” of “social subordination,” why would any feminist be heterosexual?

You can buy Sex Trouble at Amazon and read the whole thing. It is not yet illegal to tell the truth about feminism, nor is it “hate” to say that a lesbian is a lesbian. It is feminists, and not their critics, who are promoting hate by inciting hostility between men and women.

BERNIE SANDERS ON IMMIGRATION: “Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal. . . . It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that.”

It’s not quite a Godwin’s Law violation. Probably just ‘Win’s Law:

So it’s okay to have socialism, but it can’t be international socialism, it has to be socialism in one nation. A sort of national socialism, I guess.

Hopefully the flood of racist/white nationalist/Nazi idiots is becoming a trickle now that I’ve blacklisted about two dozen of the scum, but I’m shutting down comments after a couple of days wherever they’ve been pooping -just to be on the safe side and incidentally to frustrate any late-arriving subliterate fools. However, I feel it necessary to remind our Loyal Commenters of the First Rule of Troll Feeding here at The Other McCain, and that rule is DON’T. Most of you have been here long enough that I shouldn’t have to remind you, but evidently I must. The second rule, of course, is to let me know I need to bring the banhammer and the mop to the comments. Thanks, by the way, to Loyal Commenter (or lurker, who knows) R*H*, who did a great job of calling in the fire support today. If you’re ever in Vegas, I got some BOGO coupons for beer & Jack Daniels at one of the local casinos you can help me use up.

While I am dishing out the thanks, I note that I am inexcusably tardy in thanking all of you who buy books, music, movies, auto parts, cat litter, etc. through the Amazon links on my post. Every time you buy something through those links, I get a taste, and (among other things) that helps keep my Kindle filled with stuff I can review for your amusement. It doesn’t really matter what the link is for; if you’re not looking for new shoes, watches, or intimate apparel, you can just go to what you do want once you get to Amazon, and I still get a piece of the action.

If you want to express gratitude in a more personal way, here’s my wish list. Go nuts. Or not.
Also, if you think somebody really needs to see my book, but won’t buy it themselves, you can always buy a copy and gift it to them. At $0.99, it’s the next best thing to free.

And now it’s time for me to crawl off to bed, for it’s been two days without an In The Mailbox, I owe y’all, and I need to be in the tax mines at 11.

UPDATE (more like OOPSDATE, amirite?): Overslept, so In The Mailbox will be up this evening. Promise.

Let’s begin by saying I’m not a fan of Donald Trump, personally or politically. The first time he spoke at CPAC, Trump made a lot of protectionist noise in regard to China that struck me as both ignorant and irresponsible. Protective tariffs are just bad economics, as every intelligent person has understood since Adam Smith made the case against mercantilism in The Wealth of Nations. Tariffs are taxes, and the purpose of taxation is to produce revenue for the government. A protective tariff, by contrast, is not intended to produce revenue, rather it is intended to reduce foreign trade, which tends to benefit manufacturing interests at the expense of consumers and agricultural interests. Protective tariffs are usually accompanied by a system of domestic subsidies and regulations that beget crony capitalism. Whatever our economic problems, protectionism is not the solution, and so Trump’s China-bashing anti-free-trade rhetoric was distasteful.

So what? When a rich man’s wife divorces him, she always accuses him of awful things. It’s a shakedown: “Give me the money I want or I’ll drag your name through the mud and make an ugly spectacle of it.”

Who knows if it’s true? And who cares? Ivana got her money and Trump moved on with his life. It’s over. Ancient history.

This doesn’t mean I’m in favor of Trump’s candidacy, but there was no point in the Daily Beast dragging this old mess out now.

A controversy in Iowa highlights a common tactic of the Gay Left: Engage in outrageous behavior and, when this predictably provokes opposition, claim that the critics are paranoid bigots whose outrage is an expression of irrational prejudice. Thus, criticism of gay activism proves the need for more gay activism. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Parents in Humboldt, Iowa (population 4,690) are petitioning the school district “to prevent students from attending the Iowa Safe Schools conference after realizing it’s more about gay sex than bullying.” The controversy erupted after a conservative group sent an observer to the Iowa Governors Conference on LGBTQ Youth in April. A recent report by The Family Leader made clear that most of what went on at this gay activist conference had very little to do with promoting safety in schools. Everyone who has paid attention to controversies surrounding “anti-bullying” efforts in schools knows that this is a Trojan Horse by which LGBT activists are smuggling their agenda into K-12 education.

The argument is that (a) homophobia is rampant in society, (b) gay kids are viciously bullied in schools, (c) this results in high rates of suicide among “LGBT youth” and, therefore, (d) if you don’t support gay-friendly “tolerance” programs in schools, you are a hateful bigot who wants kids to kill themselves. This is a variation of “Kafkatrapping,” wherein the Left accuses opponents of bad faith (e.g., racism, sexism, homophobia) and then demands that the accused prove himself innocent. Unless you recognize the tactic and are prepared to confront it effectively, you will be forced to defend yourself in an insane situation where you know you are falsely accused, but your denial of the accusation is interpreted as proof of your guilt. (This is the scenario of Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel The Trial, whence the name “Kafkatrapping.”)

“There were only two sessions [among more than 20] that had anything to do with bullying. It’s a conference teaching kids how to: how to be confidently homosexual, how to pleasure their gay partners — one session even taught transsexual girls how to sew fake testicles into their underwear in order to pass themselves off as boys.” . . .

• One speaker wore a dress made of condoms, so they could be easily detached and “used as needed.”
• Another told a rousing story of how he used social media to find friends and accidentally stumbled into an orgy.
• One session taught how to properly use “binders” to reduce the visibility of a girl’s breasts and discussed hormone treatments for delaying puberty, assuring kids the drugs were safe.

This conference was sponsored by corporations — including Nationwide Insurance, Office Depot and the company that owns the T.J.Maxx and Marshalls clothing stores — and sponsors also included the statewide teachers union, the University of Iowa and the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa. The funding provided by these sponsor enabled Iowa’s gay activists to rent the conference center at the Prairie Meadows Casino for their event and the prestige of endorsements by school officials helped them bring children from all over the state to attend. With such resources at their disposal, Iowa Safe Schools hired “social justice comedian” Sam Killerman to entertain these underage kids with a routine that featured “humor” about the pleasures of analingus.

That was the misleading headline on a “news” article at the Web site of the Des Moines NBC affiliate, WHO-TV. The article was nothing more than free publicity — dishonest P.R. hype that advanced the false narrative of the event’s sponsors.

Understand this: Everyone involved knew in advance that this event was under hostile scrutiny. The Iowa Governor’s Conference on LGBTQ Youth was the target of criticism two years ago by the same organization that exposed what happened at this year’s conference. If organizers knew their critics would be monitoring this event, why wouldn’t they tone it down? Why did Iowa Safe Schools cram their conference schedule with seminars and performances that were certain to provoke controversy?

Nate Monson said for those trying to prevent LGBT teens from attending is, “disgusting.” Monson is the organization’s executive director and said he is working to make the event bigger and better based on the criticism from last year’s event.
“The most frustrating thing of this, it’s my job in this state to make sure statistics go down that are impacting LGBT kids. It’s incredibly frustrating that adults are being the problem and being the bully. We can do better in Iowa,” he said.

Nate Monson is a professional liar. He organized an event promoting perversion to teenagers, an event he knew would provoke criticism that he could then use to accuse critics of “being the bully,” a dishonest claim of victimhood that could (a) serve to discredit opponents and also (b) be used in fundraising appeals to the wealthy gay activists who fund Monson’s organization. Monson engages in these deceptive tactics with the active assistance of liberal journalists who are eager to give LGBT groups free publicity and actively promote their propaganda claims, including the dishonest portrayal of their opponents as bullies and bigots

This is not a conspiracy, it’s a consensus.

Among other things, this consensus involves a belief shared among Democrats (both in the media and in activist groups) that homosexuality is good for kids and Christianity is bad for kids. More importantly, by constantly attacking Christianity and constantly promoting homosexuality, the hired liars of the liberal media promote an agenda that they believe will help elect Democrats, and nothing is more important to the media than helping Democrats.

The group, titled “Concerned Citizens” is petitioning for the school to ban the event towards students in the future and called the district’s decision to allow the students to attend the conference, “a gross misuse of taxpayer money.”
However the district’s superintendent, Greg Darling, said the school did not pay for the students to attend the conference since it was hosted through a student-run club. He said the club’s organizer is in charge of fundraising efforts and must determine if the event will be attended next year.
Darling told Channel 13, “We support all clubs in the school that meet the polices and procedures. We are an equal opportunity school and do not discriminate against anyone. We strive to have a positive learning environment in the district but we do not support any group of individuals who uses profanity in presentations.”

The superintendent is saying that, whatever happened at the conference, the district will not shut down the “student-run club” that sponsored a trip to the conference, because it wouldn’t be “equal opportunity” to prevent students from being exposed to the LGBT/Democrat agenda. Everyone employed by the Iowa public school system, including Humboldt Superintendent Greg Darling, is required to endorse the LGBT/Democrat agenda, because this is the entire purpose of Iowa public schools, i.e., to teach kids to reject Christianity and vote Democrat. Becoming homosexual is not mandatory in Iowa public schools yet, but certainly no student or employee in the Iowa public school system can oppose homosexuality, for the same reason Christianity is prohibited in Iowa public schools.

In Iowa, as in every other state, the public education system exists to employ Democrat teachers and administrators, who are paid to train students to think like Democrats. Taxes are paid by Republicans in order to fund these Democrat voter-training facilities where the children of Republicans are taught to hate their parents. And nobody is allowed to tell the truth about any of this, because public schools (like the media) only employ professional liars who condemn the truth as “hate.”

The American public education system is a menace to the health and safety of America’s children. Controlled by Democrats, it has been corrupted by Democrats and operates for the benefit of Democrats — a vast criminal enterprise that defrauds taxpayers of their money in order to corrupt the hearts and minds of children.